Product Description
About time: a memoirmoves the reader to a place that no longer exists. The mining camp mirrored the streaks in the Canadian Shield with stratification along religious, ethnic and class lines. One day, a bulldozer flattened all the homes, boarding houses, churches, school, and stores leaving only the headframe that housed the cage for the miners’ descent a mile underground. Extraction would continue.Mary Ella Magill and her father harmonized in song but she wasn’t able to rescue him. She and her mother were often out of tune with one another but her mother’s legacy was the creation of a home of beauty in the barren rocky landscape. She was determined to move away. She became a serial escaper running from shame, all the while wearing a mask of calm, efficiency and success.The thread through her personal and professional lives was a desire to make things better and the courage to label harmful dynamics. In her young days, she didn’t know what she was feeling, needing or wanting. A long time later, she worked out how to move from “How should I feel?” to “This is what I feel,” and how to express what she needed or wanted.Her parents and her only sibling, an elder sister, passed away decades ago. The townsite and her family gone, the place, her childhood, and her life after leaving needed a voice.Mary Ella Magill writes with unflinching honesty about her life on the rocks, at the lakeside camp, at university, at work and beyond. She takes deep dives into unfathomable questions and stumbles along an uneven and sometimes dangerous path. This collection of vignettes invites the reader to join her as she learns the rhyme and rhythm of living, loving and letting go. Read more
